Crash when creating largish panorama

[thomas001le]

I am using Affinity Photo 1.8.5.703 on Windows 10 on a quite powerful machine (Ryzen 2700X, 32GB RAM, NVidia 2070 Ti) and try to stich a largeish panorama of 30 shots. Unfortunately, Affinity Photo repeatedly crashes when creating the panorama. The program crashes

• directly after creating the panorama, i just see a short flash of the window showing the stitched image
• when trying to use any tool in the panorama editor, it's enough to click the tool icon to make afifnity photo crash
• when minimizing and restoring affinity photo after the panorama has been stitched and is shown in the panorama editor

I don't think it's a memory issue since the total system ram usage is just 20GB according to Windows' task manager (so ~12GB left). I use Nvidia's studio drivers, so those should be quite stable. I uploaded the source files to google drive since they are quite large (1 GB): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EZI_VKYCYUlnFZkEj-P_FObZWtHYS76r/view?usp=sharing

Some crash reports are attached to the post.

reports.zip

[David in Яuislip]

How much memeory is allocated to Photo? I have 12Gb out of 16 installed

During the panorama creation the memory usage was about 3.5Gb with 34% cpu

During the next render phase it changed as the screenshot below, so 12 isn't enough as it's using the disc

Then clicking apply took yonks and smoke appeared out of the vents!

Astonishing detail of the birds!

[thomas001le]

Hi David, thanks for taking a look at my problem!

I checked the performance settings and it looks like RAM limit was already at 32GB:

 

I thought, maybe that is too much, since 32GB will never be fully available, so i lowered it to 20GB and tried again and nothing changed. I tried to create another panorama and watch memory usage. I can confirm that it peaks at ~12GB. This time rendering the panorama completed, but just clicking on the "Transform Source Image" icon crashed Affinity Photo.

[David in Яuislip]

Well your PC setup beats mine but mine works so there must be a solution. Maybe increase the File Recovery Interval, maybe - just maybe, this starts before the panorama has finished and causes chaos. I think you'll get better advice in the Affinity on Desktop Questions (Mac and Windows) forum so I'll report this post and hopefully the Mods can move it

Best of luck

[thomas001le]

I tried increasing the file record interval but with no success.

Then, just for fun I tried changing the renderer to WARP. And this actually fixed the crashes. Right now, this is 100% reproducable for me, WARP -> no crashes, NVIDIA -> crashes.

I noticed that I still had MSI Afterburner running (allows to overlock the GPU). So I disabled it and tried again using NVIDIA, still crashes.

I am running NVIDIA drivers 460.89. Now, this could mean a bug in Affinity's render code or a driver bug. Is there anything I can do to help debug this issue, so that it is fixed in future versions?

[David in Яuislip]

I increased the memory limit to 14Gb and tried again. Only Photo and two File Explorer windows open
After the Panorama finished and Photo was closed, the machine seemed very sluggish so I rebooted it before the WARP run. Strange that it took about 30s to turn off whereas it is usually instant

	Nvidia	WARP
Add	78	18
Stitch Panorama	88	90
Render Panorama	144	162
Apply	15	54
	325s	324s

I don't understand GPUs and am lucky that mine works (studio drivers) but there's not a great deal of difference overall. Rather surprising that the Add stage is so slow with the GPU

Glad you have a solution and hopefully the Serif staff will see this and look at your crash reports

 

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, David in Яuislip said:

After the Panorama finished and Photo was closed, the machine seemed very sluggish

If Photo was fully closed, it shouldn't be able to affect machine performance. But even though the UI is gone, the application may still be running. You might try redoing this with Task Manager active, and watch the CPU and storage usage, as well as confirming when Photo is really fully closed.

[David in Яuislip]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

If Photo was fully closed, it shouldn't be able to affect machine performance. But even though the UI is gone, the application may still be running. You might try redoing this with Task Manager active, and watch the CPU and storage usage, as well as confirming when Photo is really fully closed.

Yes, you would think so. I watched progress in Task Manager and saw Photo release memory then finally quit, there was no evidence that I could see of any Photo remnants. I did the panorama again just now and it behaved the same. The odd thing is that I closed Photo and the two File Explorer windows then timed windows shutdown at 47s whereas it usually takes 2-3 

At the end of the day, thomas001le has a solution and I use Hugin so all's well

[Gabe]

Hi all,

@thomas001le yours is crashing in the nvidia drivers. Try and see if you have any updates. If not, try rolling back to the previous version.